John Doerr’s advice for Obama

The alpha venture capitalist from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers has been making the rounds of Silicon Valley conferences lately, repeating his tips for startups on how to survive the recession.

But now he has advice for President-elect Barack Obama too. Speaking at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco Wednesday, Doerr said Obama should:

Pick Bill Joy, who co-founded Sun Microsystems and later joined Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, as the nation’s Chief Technology Officer, a position that doesn’t exist today but that Obama is said to be considering.

Invest billions of dollars in research on developing clean energy. (Kleiner Perkins is also an investor in clean tech).

Double the number of science and engineering graduates in the U.S. to 60,000 per year, and attach a green card to the diploma of every one who’s come from a foreign country.

Restore DARPA (the Defense Department agency that developed the Internet) to its former glory as a technology agency.

Doerr also made some doleful predictions about the venture capital industry, one of the engines of Silicon Valley’s economy. Good ideas will still get funded, he said, even though the amount of money raised by venture capitalists has been dropping steadily, but it may be three or four years before the economy recovers enough that startups can go public or merge or get acquired.

Still, he’s excited about prospects for the iPhone (“it knows who you are and where you are, has a broadband connection that’s always on, and sits in your pocket”), Internet games, a Kleiner investment called cooliris that exposes media on the Web, and clean technology.

“The second largest expense at Google is electricity,” he said, “and computers generate as much greenhouse gas as airlines. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit.”